Many people confuse continuous testing with test automation. That makes sense, because you cannot do continuous testing without automated tests. But it is much more. Continuous testing has a higher-level maturity that could require a totally different way of working—but it also gives a faster path to production.

With a week full of sessions, tutorials, training classes, and events, the STARWEST software testing conference had plenty of takeaways useful for your professional and personal life. Here are four lessons distilled from the conference’s keynote presentations on testing, communication, and directing your career.

Exploratory testing is one of the most widely known but poorly understood practices in the software testing community. The term suggests that exploratory testing is a special testing activity, but in reality, all true testing is exploratory in nature. Let's rediscover what exploratory testing should—and shouldn't—mean.